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大规模疫苗接种排程:权衡感染、吞吐量与加班

Mass Vaccination Scheduling: Trading Off Infections, Throughput, and Overtime
Management Science · 2026 · Shanshan Luo、Steven M. Shechter

中文摘要

大规模疫苗接种对疫情控制至关重要,但长时间排队会增加感染风险。我们研究了如何安排大规模疫苗接种中心的到达时间,以最小化一个三目标函数:(a)等待期间感染的期望数量,(b)吞吐量,以及(c)加班。借助一个相关优化问题的多模性(multimodularity)结果,我们构建了一种求解算法并将其应用于新冠疫情的案例研究。我们发现,尽管标准的等量分配、等间隔排程位于帕累托最优前沿附近,但它偏离了感染与加班之间权衡关系中的一个急剧拐点。具体而言,"拐点策略"在期望加班几乎相同的情况下,实现的期望感染数量约减少38%。我们还讨论了关于最优排程结构的管理启示,并将其与其他预约排程情境中著名的"圆顶形"策略进行了比较。本文由医疗管理领域的Carri Chan接收。补充材料:在线附录和数据文件可在 https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.02958 获取。

Abstract

Mass vaccination is essential for epidemic control, but long queues can increase infection risk. We study how to schedule arrivals at a mass vaccination center to minimize a tri-objective function of (a) the expected number of infections acquired while waiting, (b) throughput, and (c) overtime. Leveraging multimodularity results of a related optimization problem, we construct a solution algorithm and apply it to a case study of COVID-19. We find that although the standard equally distributed, equally spaced schedule sits near the Pareto-optimal frontier, it is located away from a sharp elbow in the tradeoff between infections and overtime. Specifically, the “elbow policy” achieves approximately 38% fewer expected infections for nearly the same expected overtime. We also discuss managerial insights around the structure of the optimal schedule and compare it to the well-known “dome-shaped” policies found in other appointment scheduling settings. This paper was accepted by Carri Chan, healthcare management. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.02958 .
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